A Two-Point-of-View Approach to the Vienna Circle

Abstract

The author proposes to consider the activities of the Vienna Circle from two different perspectives. One approach reveals the intellectual efforts of the Vienna logicians to bring the order of thought in line with the social and political “Ordnung” in Austria in the 1930s. It also brings to light the clash between the “exact thinking” and M. Heidegger’s “Das Nichts”, as well as the “new order,” whose adherents sought support not in logic, but in the collective unconscious. The other perspective allows one to highlight the problem of ethics and a system of values, as shaped and solved differently by the language of logic, and by the great Austrian writers of the time.